Ask ten video business owners how to price video projects and most will describe a version of the same thing: a number that feels right, adjusted for how much they want the job. It usually survives contact with reality until the second shoot day, the extra editor pass, and the travel nobody costed. A video budget template helps, but a spreadsheet does not know your rates and does not follow the deal.
The Quote Builder is the internal half of pricing. You cost the project phase by phase, see the margin the current scope produces, and only then decide what the client-facing number should be.
A spreadsheet is good at arithmetic and bad at everything else. Rates live in whichever copy of the file you duplicated last, formulas break when someone inserts a row, and the finished estimate has no link to the deal, the proposal, or the actual costs that land later.
More importantly, a spreadsheet never tells you whether the last twelve jobs priced this way were profitable. In VPP the estimate and the real logged costs sit on the same deal, so the gap between them is visible instead of theoretical.
Quotes are structured the way video work happens: pre-production, production, post-production, and delivery. Each phase holds its own line items with quantity, rate, and unit, so a two-day shoot with a three-person crew and a four-week edit reads as four distinct cost centres instead of a single figure you have to defend.
Because the structure matches the project phases used later in Deals & Projects, the estimate and the delivery plan speak the same language.
Crew, gear, editors, colorists, travel, and hard costs all carry a rate, and so does the work you do yourself. Pricing your own time at a minimum solo rate is the difference between a job that looks profitable and a job that actually pays you. Saved rates mean you set them once and stop rebuilding the same numbers.
Hard costs are deducted for every role, whether the person is on payroll, freelance, or you, so the margin figure reflects money out the door rather than an optimistic subtotal.
As you build, the quote shows total cost, proposed price, gross margin, and margin percentage. Add a shoot day and you see exactly what it does to the margin before you offer it. Discount the project by ten percent and you see whether the job is still worth doing.
When the numbers work, the scope pushes into the Proposal Builder as tiers and deliverables. The client sees the presentation. The cost breakdown behind it stays internal, which is exactly where it belongs.
Pro+. Quote Builder is included on Pro and Agency. It is not available on the Free plan, which covers lead capture, discovery notes, and a single proposal.
Proposal Builder — Approved scope becomes client-facing tiers and deliverables, with the cost breakdown kept internal.
Discovery Board — Deliverables captured on the call become the line items you cost, so nothing discussed gets quietly dropped.
Deals & Projects — Estimated costs sit beside the real crew and editor payments logged during delivery, so you see estimate against actual.
Financials & Reports — Project-level margin rolls up into profitability reporting, which is where systematic underpricing becomes obvious.
The calculator is client-facing and lives on your website to qualify leads on budget. The Quote Builder is internal and lives on the deal. One produces a number a prospect sees; the other produces the cost and margin analysis you use to decide what that number should be.
Yes. Crew roles, day rates, gear, and hard costs are saved in settings and pulled into every new quote. Change a rate once and future quotes use it, while existing quotes keep the rate they were built with so historical estimates stay accurate.
No. The quote is internal by default. Only the scope and pricing you deliberately push into a proposal become client-facing, and the proposal shows package prices rather than your cost lines or margin percentage.
Yes, and this is the reason to quote inside the platform. Crew payments, editor costs, and other expenses logged against the deal during delivery sit alongside the original estimate, so you can see which project types you routinely underestimate.